# What famous works of fiction, popular with readers and critics both, do you not care for? **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [September 22, 2019, 8:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-famous-works-of-fiction-popular-with-readers-and-critics-both-do-you-not-care-for/840659 "2019-09-22T20:28:53Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 5
**Author:** ![LVBoPeep](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/858c86/32.png) [@LVBoPeep](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/LVBoPeep)\ **Post date:** [September 24, 2019, 12:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-famous-works-of-fiction-popular-with-readers-and-critics-both-do-you-not-care-for/840659/81 "2019-09-24T12:54:02Z")
I despise _Little Women_ even though I enjoy similar chick classic lit. It just pales so much in comparison to other works and its simply…cheesy and bland. ---
**Author:** ![Gyrate](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/gyrate/32/3588_2.png) [@Gyrate](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Gyrate)\ **Post date:** [September 24, 2019, 1:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-famous-works-of-fiction-popular-with-readers-and-critics-both-do-you-not-care-for/840659/82 "2019-09-24T13:18:49Z")
> [@Miller](#): > > Douglas Adams had a definite gift for prose, but almost no talent at actual story-telling. HHGTG is a bunch of decent jokes that fail to cohere into anything interesting. His real metier was writing travel guides, not fiction. The early books read the way they do because they were adapted from an episodic radio show that Adams churned out virtually on the day of each recording -the main plot arc was pretty loose and everything else was just funny stuff he put in as he went. Once he got past the point of Arthur and Ford being stranded on prehistoric Earth and everyone else “eaten” and had to keep the stories going (for love or money) he started trying to write longer, more coherent stories, which strangely diminished what was lovable about the first books. Likewise, the first Dirk Gently book was extremely clever. The second one, so-so. And the scraps we’ve seen of the third one (featuring a half-existent cat) looked dire. > [@](#): > > Kurt Vonnegut’s books read like being lectured to by a college freshman. His insights are, generally, pretty trite, so he compensates by talking down to everyone around him. Vonnegut’s works make more sense if you realize not only that he’s rapidly disappearing up his own backside but that he knows he’s doing it. **Slaughterhouse Five** and **the Sirens of Titan** work because there’s a decent concept behind them but much of the rest is just riffing on the same themes. And **Breakfast of Champions** is basically a confession that he’s not really contributing any meaningful or lasting insights in his works. ---
**Author:** ![RTFirefly](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/c77e96/32.png) [@RTFirefly](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RTFirefly)\ **Post date:** [September 24, 2019, 1:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-famous-works-of-fiction-popular-with-readers-and-critics-both-do-you-not-care-for/840659/83 "2019-09-24T13:37:24Z")
> [@Nava](#): > > 1. It was a brick when I first tried it, it was a brick when I tried it again, it remains a brick. Both book and movie. I concur on both counts. The movie was kinda funky when it came out in 1968, but when I saw it again 15 years later, I had to agree with the title of the Mad Magazine parody: “201 Minutes of Space Idiocy.” I think it worked in the cultural environment of 1968, but it hasn’t been 1968 for a long time and it never will be again, so that’s that. But even in 1968, the book was clunky. ---
**Author:** ![Pantastic](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/3bc359/32.png) [@Pantastic](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Pantastic)\ **Post date:** [September 24, 2019, 2:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-famous-works-of-fiction-popular-with-readers-and-critics-both-do-you-not-care-for/840659/84 "2019-09-24T14:18:48Z")
I can’t stand Ian M Banks’s “Culture” novels. I’ve heard people and critics rave about how great and insightful they are, and the description of them sounds right up my alley, but when I read them I just bounced. There’s one that’s supposed to be an interesting metaphor about the folly of war that I found to be just a bland ‘some stuff happened, then a god reset things’, and another one that people say is deeply psychological with a surprising twist where I figured out the twist really early on and thought it was obvious enough that it couldn’t be what people were referring to. > [@Tim\_R.Mortiss](#): > > _Dune_. All talk, and the action all occurs “off-screen” so to speak. I read it in my early twenties, and whenever I told anyone I didn’t care for it, they said Oh, you were too young; read it again. So I read it again in my late thirties. Still didn’t like it. Dune is one of those books that I absolutely love and yet have zero surprise if someone else doesn’t like it - it’s really easy to see how its thick and heavy prose style and tendency towards talk rather than action puts people off. Also while I like his writing, I think most of Herbert’s stuff can easily come off as ‘this guy thinks he’s so much cleverer than he really is’. ---
**Author:** ![Pantastic](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/3bc359/32.png) [@Pantastic](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Pantastic)\ **Post date:** [September 24, 2019, 2:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-famous-works-of-fiction-popular-with-readers-and-critics-both-do-you-not-care-for/840659/85 "2019-09-24T14:26:18Z")
> [@RTFirefly](#): > > I’m just gonna say that Asimov sucked as a fiction writer: having read the _Foundation_ trilogy and the _I, Robot_ trilogy back in the day, he couldn’t create a decent character to save his life, AFAICT. I loved Asimov when I was younger but haven’t reread any recently so I may be wrong, but what I remember is that he was really good at doing the science part of science fiction; he’d take an interesting change in the laws of nature or expand on a particular theory and do a good job exploring how that stuff works in the world and come up with some interesting implications. The characters were generally not real 3-d people though, and were just there to drive whatever idea he had. I always liked the short stories better than the novels since you really need better characters to keep driving the plot of a novel. ---
**Author:** ![BwanaBob](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bwanabob/32/2985_2.png) [@BwanaBob](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BwanaBob)\ **Post date:** [September 24, 2019, 3:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-famous-works-of-fiction-popular-with-readers-and-critics-both-do-you-not-care-for/840659/86 "2019-09-24T15:13:08Z")
So easy - anything by Terry Pratchett. For me it’s nothing but wannabe Monty Pythonesque pseudo sophistication that has crawled so far up its own ass it has found its way out the mouth and is crawling down for a second round up the ass. ---
**Author:** ![Eonwe](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/eonwe/32/240_2.png) [@Eonwe](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Eonwe)\ **Post date:** [September 24, 2019, 3:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-famous-works-of-fiction-popular-with-readers-and-critics-both-do-you-not-care-for/840659/87 "2019-09-24T15:37:16Z")
> [@Morgyn](#): > > I \*\*loathed \*\*_Tom Jones_ (which I never finished) It’s not unusual. ---
**Author:** ![digs](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/digs/32/14889_2.png) [@digs](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/digs)\ **Post date:** [September 24, 2019, 4:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-famous-works-of-fiction-popular-with-readers-and-critics-both-do-you-not-care-for/840659/88 "2019-09-24T16:13:20Z")
> [@Morgyn](#): > > I \*\*loathed \*\*_Tom Jones_ (which I never finished)… I tried, but I can’t imagine any modern reader finishing the book. But it does make for a fun stage play. Hmmm, maybe best as a student production. And I’m biased; though not a theater major, I got to be Tom, swordfights, slapstick and all. And my classmates were hooting and hollering as the girl-well-known-as-a-temptress got to seduce me as we greasily made a mess of an entire chicken in the onstage tavern. (Sorry, apparently my life peaked in the '70s) ---
**Author:** ![bibliophage](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bibliophage/32/7615_2.png) [@bibliophage](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bibliophage)\ **Post date:** [September 24, 2019, 4:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-famous-works-of-fiction-popular-with-readers-and-critics-both-do-you-not-care-for/840659/89 "2019-09-24T16:16:50Z")
I didn’t love _Gatsby_ but I liked it well enough. Almost all the characters are unsympathetic, but somehow Fitzgerald made me care what happens to them. Not so with _Tender is the Night_. All the characters are assholes, and I didn’t care if they all died in a fiery crash. I read all the way to the end because I kept expecting it to get better. It never did. I don’t normally read condensed versions of novels, but that’s the only way I can read Dickens. The condensed versions of _Oliver Twist_, \*Great Expectations, \* and _David Copperfield_ are pretty good. The original versions are impenetrable. It’s apparently [not true that Dickens was paid by the word](http://legendsrevealed.com/entertainment/2015/04/28/was-charles-dickens-really-paid-by-the-word/). But he damn well wrote as if he were. I was required to read _The Scarlet Letter_ in high school. At the time I hated it. I don’t think my fifteen-year-old self was prepared to connect with it. I have the feeling that if I tried reading it again through adult eyes that I might like it better. But I haven’t tried. ---
**Author:** ![AHunter3](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ahunter3/32/368_2.png) [@AHunter3](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AHunter3)\ **Post date:** [September 24, 2019, 4:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-famous-works-of-fiction-popular-with-readers-and-critics-both-do-you-not-care-for/840659/90 "2019-09-24T16:17:55Z")
_The Once and Future King_ by T H White. Forced to read it in high school. I think it poisoned me from ever being able to enjoy anything pertaining to King Arthur, with the possible exception of Purcell (but that’s music and that’s different). ---
**Author:** ![Treppenwitz](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/treppenwitz/32/3445_2.png) [@Treppenwitz](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Treppenwitz)\ **Post date:** [September 24, 2019, 4:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-famous-works-of-fiction-popular-with-readers-and-critics-both-do-you-not-care-for/840659/91 "2019-09-24T16:34:09Z")
Tolkein. I read The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings when I was, oh, fourteen, and thought it - especially Rings - was the best thing ever written. At around thirty, I thought I would reread them; really enjoyed The Hobbit, didn’t get fifty pages into Rings, flat out hated it as pretentious crap. I conclude that age matters. > [@digs](#): > > A lot of books from “back in the day” were insightful, life-changing books AT THE TIME. Holden Caulfield only makes sense in a repressed post-war society where conformity is enforced, and when every other book written with a young protagonist is a sappy morality play. A teenager who was allowed to be cynical was revolutionary. Notwithstanding digs’ excellent point, you’re not getting me out of here without me giving **Catcher** another kicking… j ---
**Author:** ![AHunter3](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ahunter3/32/368_2.png) [@AHunter3](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AHunter3)\ **Post date:** [September 24, 2019, 4:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-famous-works-of-fiction-popular-with-readers-and-critics-both-do-you-not-care-for/840659/92 "2019-09-24T16:34:30Z")
> [@Llama\_Llogophile](#): > > I made very good faith efforts with Moby Dick … ended up putting [it] down. Finally picked up a copy of _Moby Dick_ from the library earlier this year. It was one of those books I’d heard of all my life and never read. I think I was expecting the main character, Ishmael, to narrate with the voice of a rough-life-living, hard-bitten, no-more-education-than-he-needed, seen-it-all kind of sailor. Something like this, I guess: > [@](#): > > We was comin’ back from the island of Tinian to Leyte, just delivered the bomb. The Hiroshima bomb. Eleven hundred men went into the water. Vessel went down in twelve minutes. Didn’t see the first shark for about a half an hour. Tiger. Thirteen-footer. You know how you know that when you’re in the water, Chief? You tell by lookin’ from the dorsal to the tail. Instead, I get this kind of narrative: > [@](#): > > The warmly cool, clear, ringing, perfumed, overflowing, redundant days, were as crystal goblets of Persian sherbet, heaped up – flaked up, with rose-water snow. The starred and stately nights seemed haughty dames in jewelled velvets, nursing at home in lonely pride, the memory of their absent conquering Earls, the golden helmeted suns. For sleeping man, 'twas hard to choose between such winsome days and such seducing nights. But all the witcheries of that unwaning weather did not merely lend new spells and potencies to the outward world. :mad: yeah, I tossed it aside after about 120 pages. ---
**Author:** ![Shodan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/9f8e36/32.png) [@Shodan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Shodan)\ **Post date:** [September 24, 2019, 4:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-famous-works-of-fiction-popular-with-readers-and-critics-both-do-you-not-care-for/840659/93 "2019-09-24T16:58:12Z")
> [@Pantastic](#): > > I loved Asimov when I was younger but haven’t reread any recently so I may be wrong, but what I remember is that he was really good at doing the science part of science fiction; he’d take an interesting change in the laws of nature or expand on a particular theory and do a good job exploring how that stuff works in the world and come up with some interesting implications. The characters were generally not real 3-d people though, and were just there to drive whatever idea he had. I always liked the short stories better than the novels since you really need better characters to keep driving the plot of a novel. Asimov is like Agatha Christie. The characters are stock and formulaic, but the characters are not what the story is about. The story is about the idea. Like Christie, Asimov wrote so much that he came up with formulae (like The Black Widowers stories) that he could fit his ideas into. When it worked, it worked, but not because he was great at characterization. _Confederacy of Dunces_ has been mentioned enough. It just sucked. Likewise everything F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote. He just isn’t a good writer. I have only tried to plow thru _Dune_ once, and sometimes I think I should try again. It took two tries to get thru LotR, and I enjoyed the second try. But life is short. I am afraid of it winding up like _Nicholas Nickleby_ - I like Dickens, but the slog wasn’t worth being able to say that I have read all of Dickens. My only original contribution to the thread is going to be _The Brothers Karamazov_. It was enthusiastically recommended to me as one of those books “You Have to Read!” Hopefully I only Have to Read half of it, because that is as far as I got. My word, what a grind, and when I got to the shocking part, I had no f\*cks left to give. Regards, Shodan ---
**Author:** ![Ukulele\_Ike](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/u/df788c/32.png) [@Ukulele\_Ike](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ukulele_Ike)\ **Post date:** [September 24, 2019, 5:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-famous-works-of-fiction-popular-with-readers-and-critics-both-do-you-not-care-for/840659/94 "2019-09-24T17:38:10Z")
> [@AHunter3](#): > > Finally picked up a copy of _Moby Dick_ from the library earlier this year. It was one of those books I’d heard of all my life and never read…yeah, I tossed it aside after about 120 pages. May I recommend the University of California reprint of the Arial Press edition, which includes dozens of woodcut illustrations by the great Barry Moser? I found it was easier to get through the long sections on cetology and whaleboat equipment when you could see what the hell Melville was talking about. ---
**Author:** ![DrDeth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/b487fb/32.png) [@DrDeth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DrDeth)\ **Post date:** [September 24, 2019, 6:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-famous-works-of-fiction-popular-with-readers-and-critics-both-do-you-not-care-for/840659/95 "2019-09-24T18:20:16Z")
> [@Qadgop\_the\_Mercotan](#): > > … > > **Lord of the Flies** by William Golding. Kids can be jerks. Got it. > > [… > **The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe** by C. S. Lewis. The fantasy world too comic, the allegory too heavy-handed for my tastes. > > **The Old Man and the Sea** by Ernest Hemingway. Let it go already, Old Man! That way, the author can go off and fatally pester some bulls or something. Yep. I didnt spot the allegory until my late teens, read it as a kid, loved it. A Hemingway short they can have kids read. It’s Ok. I tried \*Confederacy of Dunces \*, couldnt manage it. I hate Faulkner. Shelby Foote has been lauded for his Civil war books, but they are too full of Southern Sympathy for me, Foote worshiped that racist murderer war criminal Forrest. Best thing about \*Last of the Mohicans \* is Twains takedown of it. I like Asimov, especially his Non-fiction, but the Foundation Trilogy still stands head and shoulders above most. Later Heinlein is dreck, sadly, with flashes of brilliance. ☹ But his earlier stuff, esp his juveniles are classics. ---
**Author:** ![JohnT](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johnt/32/15048_2.png) [@JohnT](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JohnT)\ **Post date:** [September 24, 2019, 6:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-famous-works-of-fiction-popular-with-readers-and-critics-both-do-you-not-care-for/840659/96 "2019-09-24T18:40:57Z")
[Cartman]Every time one of these threads appears all you guys do is pile on me for not liking Huckleberry Finn. Huckleberry Finn! Huckleberry Finn! Ahhh, screw you guys, I’m going home.[/Cartman] ---
**Author:** ![Ukulele\_Ike](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/u/df788c/32.png) [@Ukulele\_Ike](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ukulele_Ike)\ **Post date:** [September 24, 2019, 7:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-famous-works-of-fiction-popular-with-readers-and-critics-both-do-you-not-care-for/840659/97 "2019-09-24T19:41:55Z")
> [@JohnT](#): > > [Cartman]Every time one of these threads appears all you guys do is pile on me for not liking Huckleberry Finn. Huckleberry Finn! Huckleberry Finn!..[/Cartman] All right, then, you can go to hell. (Clever literary reference. Please don’t censure me, moderators) ---
**Author:** ![JohnT](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johnt/32/15048_2.png) [@JohnT](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JohnT)\ **Post date:** [September 24, 2019, 7:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-famous-works-of-fiction-popular-with-readers-and-critics-both-do-you-not-care-for/840659/98 "2019-09-24T19:55:50Z")
lol, no I got it. ---
**Author:** ![asterion](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/4da419/32.png) [@asterion](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/asterion)\ **Post date:** [September 24, 2019, 8:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-famous-works-of-fiction-popular-with-readers-and-critics-both-do-you-not-care-for/840659/99 "2019-09-24T20:18:07Z")
> [@Nava](#): > > Having been very glad to discover that his full works were available on the kindle for nothing or thereabouts, I’ve discovered I can only read Twain in translation. His attempts to represent the pronunciations of words rmake him incomprehensible to me in the original ☹ I still like those of his books I’ve read… but they need some masochist to have slogged through those rendered pronunciations for me. If it makes you feel any better, attempts at rendered dialect can often stump native English speakers. Twain did it fairly well, but it still helps to have heard the dialect actually spoken if you’re then going to read it. And if the author is bad at it, forget it. I’m pretty sure I’ve given up on books simply because I didn’t want to try to parse the attempt at representing the dialect. ---
**Author:** ![DrDeth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/b487fb/32.png) [@DrDeth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DrDeth)\ **Post date:** [September 24, 2019, 9:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-famous-works-of-fiction-popular-with-readers-and-critics-both-do-you-not-care-for/840659/100 "2019-09-24T21:23:49Z")
> [@asterion](#): > > If it makes you feel any better, attempts at rendered dialect can often stump native English speakers. Twain did it fairly well, but it still helps to have heard the dialect actually spoken if you’re then going to read it. And if the author is bad at it, forget it. I’m pretty sure I’ve given up on books simply because I didn’t want to try to parse the attempt at representing the dialect. Twains great job at dialect has been praised by those that study such things, it’s important to have a record of them. For myself, i have no problems with it. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-famous-works-of-fiction-popular-with-readers-and-critics-both-do-you-not-care-for/840659.md?page=4) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-famous-works-of-fiction-popular-with-readers-and-critics-both-do-you-not-care-for/840659.md?page=6)